In college I earned a Bachelors in Psychology. On the surface, it is the most ubiquitously useless degree you can earn. In reality, I learned things about human behavior that I have been able to apply since the day I learned them, to nearly ever facet of my life, including business. I make this point because no matter how good your idea, business plan, technical skills or charisma, the one thing you can never overlook or completely quantify is human behavior. For all of our intelligence we are also emotional and often irrational.

You can however infer patterns and learn how to think about human behavior so that you can direct it, or direct your business toward its tendencies so that you end up with the desired result.

What brought me to this seemingly off topic discussion was an e-mail I received from Perry Marshall today (whom by the way, if you don't keep up with you should). Perry made the following point and it is an extremely important lesson to remember: People don't buy prevention, they buy a cure for their existing problem.

In his own words regarding prevention: "if you want to sell it, it's much easier to sell it as
part of a cure than trying to convince someone who's never had the problem in the first place." Let's face it, if we have never been faced with the problem, we just don't think about it.

Trying to convince someone to take action to prevent something from happening typically leads to counter-productive activities such as beating your head against a desk. Companies don't think about e-Discovery until they get sued, most people start to workout once they feel the need to loose weight, not to keep it off in the first place (let's be honest here), that is simply the overwhelming trend.

Of course there are exceptions, but most of them are easily contradicted by other behavior. We take vitamins to help us stay health but may still eat more than is so. Where does the exception become the rule? When the probability of an event and the cost of not preventing it from happening greatly exceed (think in terms of catastrophic loss/exponential amounts here) the cost of preventing it or managing the risk in a proactive manner (this is why we buy insurance); So tailor your product accordingly.

The point is, people are infinitely more likely to take action (i.e. buy) to solve a problem they have now, not to keep one from happening in the first place. So apply your ideas to solving existing problems and somewhere in there bundle your value added product or service to keep the problem from coming back or to drive operational efficiency. You'll sell far more and your customers will love you.

Labels: behavior, ideas